Three Degrees of Separation

Julie Fanselow draws the lines from a citizen who wrote a Reader’s View supporting Bill Sali. Allen Gorin is not part of the Sali campaign, but Julie connects the dots because Allen Gorin is Jewish and the leader of Towards Tradition in Idaho.

Bad move. A simple Google of Toward Tradition turns up the group’s long ties to convicted lobbyist Abramoff, who was a longtime director and served as chairman of the board. There’s more at Grassroots for Grant.

It’s such a big thing, the official Larry Grant blog latched on to this like a dog on red meat, using suppositions to tar Towards Tradition as a front group for Abrahamoff. Rabbi Daniel Lappin has given his side of the story:

Sometime before the summer of 2000 Jack Abramoff asked Toward Tradition whether we had already hired the DC-based organizer for that fall’s conference. Upon hearing that we had nobody appointed yet, he offered to provide someone. He mentioned that he knew an individual who had the experience and connections that we were seeking and that she was currently looking for work. This was Lisa Rudy. He added that he might know a donor willing to donate a gift to Toward Tradition to be used to hire a DC based coordinator who would help us with our forthcoming conference.

It is not uncommon for donors to make specific gifts for specific purposes so we suspected nothing amiss and our board approved hiring Lisa Rudy especially since her salary was to be covered by a donor. It is also not uncommon for donors to enlist the support of their friends and business contacts for their cause. Thus we were not surprised when a check arrived from Jack Abramoff for $25,000 made out by a firm called ELottery, with directions to pay Lisa Rudy $5,000/month for her services as our local conference coordinator. We received a couple more checks from other Abramoff clients, allowing us to continue paying Lisa Rudy until the post-conference work was complete which was January of 2001. Toward Tradition paid her the total of what we received from Jack Abramoff for that purpose. Nothing of those gifts was retained for Toward Tradition’s general use; they were only used to hire a professional organizer in what we thought was a completely legitimate arrangement.

As I understand it, Abramoff pled guilty to intending to influence Lisa Rudy’s husband who worked for Tom DeLay by “providing ten equal monthly payments totaling $50,000 through a non-profit entity to the wife of Staffer A.” The Justice Department questioned whether Lisa Rudy had actually done work for Toward Tradition. Toward Tradition documentation clearly demonstrated that, in all innocence, we had thoroughly employed her services and that she had in fact done for us all that the local coordinator was supposed to do at a fee within the range of what we expected to pay for the services provided.

To clarify, the $25,000 check to Toward Tradition was NOT for lobbying purposes in favor of gambling. Not only has Toward Tradition or myself never engaged in lobbying, but I have never written or spoken in favor of gambling. In fact we have radio shows and articles, as well as excerpts from my books in which my negative views of gambling, especially government sanctioned gambling are no secret. At the time, back in 2000, Toward Tradition assumed that Jack, still a member of the board, was doing what many non-profit board members do for the non-profit organization they serve, which was solicit a gift from a business associate for our benefit.

This sounds reasonable, but you see the Democrats operate in a guilty until proven innocent culture, so they tie the State Director of a National Group with ties to Abramoff to a Congressional Candidate that State Coordinator supports and call it good politics.

I call it desperate politics. This is the type of low ball tactic you expect to see in October, not late June when nobody’s paying attention anyway. Bubblehead is the voice of reason in this sanity and points out a problem:

While this is interesting, and could be looked into, I’m not sure that “someone writing to the paper about Sali belongs to a group with ties to Abramoff” is really that much of a smoking gun. After all, someone could find that someone writing to the Statesman about Larry has ties to MoveOn.org, which would show that Larry “keeps company” with that group. (In Idaho, my guess is that having ties to MoveOn would be as deadly politically as having ties to Abramoff.)

Good point, you wouldn’t want someone with ties to MoveOn.org writing a letter to the editor for Larry Grant, let alone Larry Grant’s paid blogger. On Blog for America three years ago, the following comment was written by Ms. Fanselow:

“I got a notice from Moveon.org today, as many of you probably did, requesting that we counter Bush’s PR offensive re: Iraq with some public relations of our own…Echoing John Kerry and International ANSWER she wrote, “We need a regime change here at home.”

Now, what does it say about the Larry Grant campaign? If Moveon.org is a negative affiliation, Julie’s even linked to them off the official campaign blog.

Julie said, “In my opinion, MoveOn.org is unfarily [sic, heh yes liberals make spelling errors, too] painted as some sort of radical organization, but its aims and values are mostly quite centrist (as Alan at Idablue pointed out a while back …)” because you can tie Julie Fanselow to any big left wing website in America, whether it’s MyDD, Daily Kos and Blog for America, go through and find the vicious and mean things on those sites, the new scandal breaking with Kos allegedly doing a pay for play deal where he was alleged to support candidates who hired one of his buddies.

Now, to lay that all at the feet of Julie Fanselow, and by extension Larry Grant, would be quite a stretch. I’m not by any extension making that connection, but that is what Larry Grant’s doing. This personal attack makes Grant and his campaign look petty and foolish, and, as the public finds out about it, I think it’ll cost them.

UPDATE:

Julie Responds:

Anyway, as I expected, Adam had a problem with my posts pointing out how Allen Gorin is part of an organization with extensive ties to Jack Abramoff and, because of that, Gorin may want to think twice before ID’ing himself as Toward Tradition’s Idaho rep when he’s writing on Sali’s behalf. And although Gorin may not be on Sali’s payroll, he works very closely with Sali’s circle (the Idaho Values Alliance, in particular). He certainly is “part” of the Sali campaign when he writes an op-ed defending Sali against a newspaper columnist.

The headline of Julie’s story was not “Allen Gorin Is Part of Abramoff Group.” The headline was “The Sali-Abramoff connection.” The purpose of this is obvious—to create a spurious link between Sali and Abramoff. The official campaign blog story attempted a guilt by association theme. In addition, both pieces attempted a slander on a decent man in the ruthless attacks on Allen Gorin. Gorin is not on the national board of Toward Tradition and had nothing to do with the decision, whatever its legality.

No leader of Toward Tradition has been sent to jail or arrested, indicted or implicated, only Abramoff. This is a smear campaign of shameful proportions, giving a false impression without speaking a false word.

Julie argues Moveon.org is “larger” and more centrist. The second point, that Julie believes MoveOn.org is a centrist group, shows how out of touch she is. MoveOn.org has argued for the censure of President Bush (a position most Democrat Senators reject,) it has partnered with the far left-wing International ANSWER. They’ve been the Tin Foil Hat group babbling about conspiracies in the last two elections. The problem here becomes when you’re so far left you can’t see the Center.

Good thing the Grant campaign uses plausible deniability by saying they don’t endorse where they link.

Julie doesn’t see the problem with the using the same language for George W. Bush that was used for Saddam Hussein. It’s a comparison of a man who killed 300,000 of his own people to the President of the United States.

Adam criticized me for reporting the Gorin story in June, saying it smacks of something a desperate campaign would do in October. Huh? What’s your point? I didn’t wait until the fall; I reported it the day I saw Gorin’s column. People deserve to know the associations involved. In fact, I hope people write letters to the Statesman and other newspapers pointing out Sali’s ties to such fringe groups as Toward Tradition and the Club for Growth.

It helps to criticize these groups without explaining what they do. Regardless, my point is this. The Grant campaign is behaving desperately at a time when a campaign ought to be giving people reasons to vote for them. Larry Grant’s message as portrayed on the web by his bloggers is simply that Bill Sali is a bad guy and look at all these scary people. Oooh, be afraid, vote for Grant. Meanwhile, Grant’s profile on the issues is sketchy and most have no clue where he stands.

In San Francisco, Moveon.org is a centrist group, but, as Democrats will learn this fall, Boise isn’t San Francisco.

Alan at Idablue said about a month ago that he didn’t want Grant to be negative but:

If Sali attacks Grant with negative campaigning – and I guarantee right here and now that he will – I just want Grant to be ready with some ideas to attack back.

Apparently, the Grant campaign would disagree.

UPDATE:

Reviewing a list of board members from 2003-2005, a liberal site found Gorin on the list of Towards Tradition Board members during the same time as Abramoff. It still doesn’t prove anything. This is really guilt by association without some type of conviction for wrongdoing. But, I forgot, innocent until proven guilty does not apply to Republicans.

Bill Sali